LIBERTY IS NOT PERSONAL:

Much of what I know about China I learned from Walter H. Judd, who was a medical missionary in China in the 1920s and the 1930s. Dr. Judd is relevant to our discussion because he was a major influence on the American conservative movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. Indeed, what he said about China was very nearly the gospel for many conservatives.

After a year's study at the University of Nanking, Dr. Judd was posted to the Shaowu mission in the town of Shaowu, Fukien Province, so far into the interior that it could only be reached by a 10day boat trip up the Min River. He spent the next five years in Shaowu, caring for the sick and the dying, facing death at the hands of bandits, criticizing the Nationalists, debating with Communists, including Gen. Lin Piao, going for months without seeing another white face, and falling deeply in love with China until, his life threatened by persistent bouts of malaria, he reluctantly came home to the United States.

Dr. Judd had many Communists as his patients in Shaowu, and he was always impressed by their discipline. They first came through his town in 1926 when they were part of Chiang Kaishek's united front against the warlords. "They were the first military outfit I ever saw," said Dr. Judd, "that never had a case of venereal disease."

He returned to the Middle Kingdom in 1934 to take charge of a large hospital in Fenchow, Shansi Province, in the North where he would not be exposed to malaria. During his second tour of duty in China, he often found himself under martial law as Communists and Nationalists vied fiercely for control of the area before forming an uneasy united front against the invading Japanese. In early 1938, Fenchow fell to the Japanese, and Dr. Judd was a "guest" of the occupying Japanese forces for five tense months.

Miraculously, Dr. Judd was allowed to leave Fenchow and return to the United States after treating the Japanese commanding general for a sexual disease he had contracted from a Chinese woman. The embarrassed general sought help from the American physician because he did not want to lose face by revealing the nature of his illness to a Japanese doctor. And he made sure that none of his countrymen would learn about his problem by sending the American who had treated him back home, 10,000 miles away.

For the rest of his long life, Dr. Judd gave many speeches about Asia, always emphasizing the central importance of China. He would hold up his hand, palm out, and say:

This is Asia. My palm is China and my fingers are the nations extending from the continent Korea, Japan, IndoChina, the Philippines, and Indonesia. When China is at peace and under a government that truly represents the interests of the Chinese people, all of Asia is at peace. But if China is at war and under a government that does not represent the true interests of the Chinese people, all of Asia is in conflict.

Russell Kirk and The Conservative Mind

It is a striking historical coincidence that both the People's Republic of China and the modern American conservative movement were born a little over 50 years ago, the PRC in 1949 with the coming to power of Mao Zedung and modern conservatism in 1953 with the publication of Russell Kirk's masterwork, The Conservative Mind.

Chairman Mao famously declared that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. While that may be true for certain regimes in certain circumstances, such political power cannot be sustained permanently, for it requires ever larger barrels and ever more guns. Political power that depends exclusively for its survival upon force inevitably degenerates into military power and leads to an authoritarian and usually a totalitarian state. Chairman Mao's aphorism in fact denies the reality that lasting political power grows not out of a gun, but out of an idea.

The central idea of The Conservative Mind, upon which American conservatism is essentially based, is ordered liberty. It is a blending of the sometimes contending requirements of the community and the individual, of individual freedom and individual responsibility, of limited government and unlimited markets.

Tweet   @brothersjudd